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No underhand dealings in US$178 million Kelni-GVG contract - Minister

By
Benjamin Mensah, GNA

Accra, May 31, GNA – Mrs. Ursula Owusu Ekuful,
Minister for Communications, has defended the award of a US$178 million
telecommunication company’s monitoring contract to Kelni-GVG, saying, that the
deal is in the best national interest.

She flatly rejected claims about it being
wasteful and milking the public purse.

The Minister told Parliament that there was
absolutely no corruption or any underhand dealings.

“I can never be party to any such conduct as I
value my reputation and the reputation of the government.”

She had been summoned by the Speaker to
apprise the Members of Parliament (MPs) of details of the contract, which had
generated intense public debate.

Mr. Franklin Cudjoe, President of IMANI
Africa, a policy think-tank, has been vocal in his criticism of contract and
has been demanding that it should be abrogated.

The Minister, however, has an entirely
different position and it is that “this is the best deal we could get”.

Under it Ghana was going to own all the
monitoring equipment at the end of the five-year agreement.

Mrs. Owusu-Ekuful said the contract was in
compliance with the Communication Service (Amendment) Act passed in 2013,
adding that, the passage of the Electronic Communications Amendment Act, 2009
(Act 786), imposed a duty on the state to monitor the 19 cents per minute
charged by network operators for international calls terminated in Ghana.

A similar contract had been signed with Subah
Infosolutions Limited in 2010 but that
had been abrogated by the government.

This was because Subah was said not to be
doing the traffic monitoring on a real-time basis, as data was only collected
from the servers of the Mobile Network Operators.

The network operators persisted in denying
them the right to connect to their physical network nodes to collect the raw
data for analysis.

The Minister was emphatic that “no other
system or company is currently providing the service” Kelni GVG was going to
perform.

“The mobile money interoperability platform of
the Ghana Interbank Payment Settlement Systems Limited (GhIPSS) monitors
transactions between two or more telcos and the banks but does not monitor
transactions on one network.”

The Common Monitoring Platform (CMP), she
said, however “does so”.

Again neither the National Communication
Authority (NCA) nor the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) “currently has the
capability of providing this service and have indicated so”.

The Minister added that “the CMP will provide
real-time monitoring of all traffic volumes on all networks as has never
happened before” and that it was currently conducting anti-fraud testing as
envisaged.

The Network Operations Centre had been set up,
connected and equipped with hardware and software.

Mrs. Owusu-Ekuful said everything was ready
for all operators to be connected and they were notified on May 11, 2018.

“All deliverables and timelines under the
contract have been met to date.”